


a dream aloud

by swingingparty



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Banter, Developing Relationship, F/M, First Kiss, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Pepper Potts, Pepper Potts Feels, Pepper Potts Needs a Hug, Pining, Pre-Iron Man 1, Pre-Relationship, Romance, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-06 21:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20298496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: Finally, he breaks his staring match with her resume and looks back up at her, head tilted to one side. There’s dark, bruise-like shadows under his eyes that don’t remotely match the tone of the now-full grin he gives her.“Welcome to Stark Industries, Virginia.”“Thank you, Mr. Stark.”—(or; a collection of moments of their relationship, pre-iron man)





	a dream aloud

—

Pepper meets him for the first time on a Friday in the middle of July. 

It’s swelteringly hot - so hot that even the air conditioning inside the Stark Industries building can do little to abate the heat that fills the office rooms, pressing into her from all sides. She had been given two options upon her hiring - either wait until the week was out and start on the following Monday or come in for a half-day on Friday to give her some time to get ‘acclimated’ to the place, in the words of the email. Feeling that showing up early was probably the sort of thing that was expected of Stark Industries employees - and knowing it was the sort of thing she expected from herself - she replied to the email, informing the sender that, yes, she would like to come in on Friday.

She’s regretting it now - the heat’s made sure of that. By the time she’s escorted to the door of Tony Stark’s office by his head of security Happy Hogan - “boss wants to meet you,” the man explained, tone somewhere in between gruff and apologetic - her head is pounding in time with the noise her heels make on the tiled floor.

She knocks on his door twice before entering and that is the first time she stands in a room with Tony Stark.

He’s smaller in person. Less aggressive and talkative than she’d expected - though it’s probably due to the fact that they have never spoken before and he probably has some sort of handle on his emotions - but she can almost feel a sort of energy radiating off of him as she steps inside, like he’s constantly primed to explode.

“Ah.” He blinks up at her. His expression is odd, like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to smile at her or not, so he stuck with a simply contorting his face into a crooked half-grin that leaves one of the corners of his lips awkwardly raised up “You must be the new assistant.”

She nods, ducking her head. There’s something about his stare that makes her distinctly uncomfortable. Not in the vaguely predatory, definitely creepy way she’s well accustomed to by now, but a different sort of uncomfortable. Like he’s somehow managing to read her mind, dissect her every thought and feeling just by staring into her eyes.

His are brown. The same color as the table he sits at. She focuses on it as she carefully removes a sheaf of papers from her bag and sets it on the table, pushing it slowly towards him.

“My name is Virginia Potts,” she says, tapping said moniker that’s emboldened at the top of the first paper she passed him. “Mr. Hogan advised me to bring a copy of my resume and records to you - he mentioned that you might’ve misplaced the earlier copies I sent you so - here.”

She taps the papers one more time for emphasis and steps back.

Tony Stark stares at the place where her finger was for a long time - long enough for her to start feeling even more uncomfortable. The heat is oppressive, making her head spin, and she could’ve sworn to god Tony had blinked maybe twice since she entered the room.

Finally, he breaks his staring match with her resume and looks back up at her, head tilted to one side. There’s dark, bruise-like shadows under his eyes that don’t remotely match the tone of the now-full grin he gives her.

“Welcome to Stark Industries, Virginia.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stark.”

And then she leaves. She can feel his eyes boring into her back the whole walk back to her desk.

—

She does not talk to Tony Stark for the first few months she’s working at Stark Industries. She’s working as the assistant to the assistant to the head of god-knows-what and the only times she ever steps within ten feet of Tony are at employee functions and the occasional press conference.

The press conferences are the more interesting ones. The first one she’s asked to attend - the assistant of the assistant she works for was sick and, apparently, Tony Stark requested a temporary replacement for the day - is about some new prototype for a new missile Stark Industries is working on. 

Tony talks animatedly the whole conference, hands waving through the air, snapping his fingers when he forgets a word. His - close friend, confidant, whatever-the-man is Obadiah Shane sits at his shoulder, staring out into the crowd of reporters unblinkingly as Tony rambles on about electron fusion and metal composition rates and a billion other things that go right over Pepper’s head. 

He knows most of the journalists by name. Jokes with them, even asks a few of them personal questions about their other writings or interests or families, like they’re at a party and he’s making small talk, not a press conference. 

She’s getting a cup of water after the conference is finished when he comes up next to her, one hand wrapped around a glass filled with Scotch, if she had to guess, and the other holding one of the cookies they were offering out front. 

“Nice to see you, Miss Potts,” he says, sipping his drink. 

She focuses on keeping the pitcher steady. “You did very well up there, Mr. Stark.”

She can see him open his mouth - to take another drink, to respond, to go off on some tangent, who knows - when someone in the distance calls his name. He ducks his head and walks away without another word. 

—

She is invited to the next press conference, too, despite the assistant of the assistant she works for being in fighting form this time. 

It is the same procedure. Same jokes, same spiel of science and data she only vaguely comprehends, same animated explanations and gestures. 

They do not speak afterwards. Pepper is pushing one of the drinks carts out the door when she catches his eye. He’s still clutching a glass of Scotch, the cookie in his other hand having been traded out for a stack of papers. He gives her a warm smile which she feels herself return without even having to think about it. 

She leaves the conference room as soon as she can. 

—

She is asked to fill in for his personal assistant after six months of working at Stark Industries. 

Even though she has only been in the same room as him a handful of times and spoken to him even less, she knows by now to not question any of the choices she makes. She’s heard variations of the same thing from practically everyone who knows she’s now working for him - from her friends and colleagues and other employees and the random guys she goes out on dates with to pass the time: Tony Stark is the kind of guy who does exactly what he wants when he wants to And, if one of the things he currently wants is for her to fill in as his personal assistant, then so be it. Debating the point really isn't worth losing her job over, or anything like that, she figures.

She spends most of the day fielding calls, responding to various business associates on behalf of him, getting people to sign things, having his lunch delivered, arranging transport for some gala he’s supposed to be attending that night, having his suit delivered to the office for that said gala, and hunting Tony down to pass on various messages deemed ‘too important to wait,’ mostly coming from Obadiah Stane.

“The Tokyo branch called,” she informs him at around four in the afternoon, swooping in on him as he’s getting a drink of water from the cooler outside his office room. “They want to revisit the negotiations about the tariffs agreed upon last summer. I have them on hold on line four.”

He makes a small _ hm _-ing noise in the back of his throat, staring at the water cooler.

“How’s the tux looking for tonight?” he says instead.

“Fine, Mr. Stark. It’s the one you had ordered last week. From Monaco, I believe.”

“No tears? Sometimes it gets torn during shipping. That’s always annoying.”

“No tears, Mr. Stark. Now, the Tokyo -”

“Is your name really Virginia?”

Pepper figures she should probably be annoyed at his refusal to do any of the things she needs him to do - or, rather, _ he _ needs to do; seriously, it took her the better part of an hour earlier in the morning to get him to focus long enough to read some contract Obadiah had sent over - but she isn’t. _ It’s Tony Stark_, she reminds herself. _ This is just how he is. _

So she smiles a little. “Yes, Mr. Stark. That’s what it says on my birth certificate, at least.”

“You don’t look like a Virginia,” he observes, turning to face her. His eyes are bright, the lights overhead making them sparkle a little. His gaze cuts through her like a laser. 

“So I’ve been told,” she replies. 

“Got a nickname?”

“Pepper.” Because, honestly, why not? This is for one day. They’re never going to speak to each other again, much less get close enough where he would ever feel obliged to use her first name - the one she actually _ likes_, no less.

But he nods and smiles a little, looking almost triumphant. “Pepper,” he echoes. “Pepper Potts. I like that.” He downs the cup of water and tosses it in the trash next to him. “Now, what about that Tokyo branch?”

—

Two months later, she gets an email from Tony Stark’s personal server. 

It’s asking her to fill the suddenly-available role as his new personal assistant. 

She doesn’t know what to do. She thinks about it for a while, actually. She debates the prospect of turning down the offer for a full three days after he gives it. She takes what she knows about Tony Stark and lays it out on her mental table for her to assess it. He is a womanizer. He is rumored to be an alcoholic. Despite him owning the company, she has seen him inside the building maybe three times in the time she has worked there. His parents are dead. He is a genius. He makes more money each minute than she does in a year. He has three PhDs. He has slept with every single PA he has ever had - this one is conjecture, but she has a feeling that it’s not far off the mark. He is noted for being irrational, childish, ornery, and an outright handful. If Pepper had an ounce of common sense in her body at any point in time, she would say no to this. 

She says yes. 

—

She realizes two very important things about Tony Stark within five hours of her first day.

One, he is nothing like how the public says he is - or maybe how he wants the public to think he is. His energy comes out in leaps and bounds once they’re out of the office; he is erratic and energetic, practically bouncing off the walls as he half-drags Pepper around his mansion, showing her everything from his workshop to the fridge to her office. He speaks very fast and blends eloquence and colloquialisms in a way that makes her head ache. He is rude sometimes, but that seems to be mostly out of a force of habit. He never stops moving, and he never looks away from her face.

Two, he does not plan anything. He does everything in the moment, preferring to improvise or flat-out bullshit his way through the day’s events. One of the first things he tells her as he ushers her inside is that he has no idea what he needs her to do today. She’s pretty sure her office wasn’t even intended to be her office. This realization leaves her somewhere between annoyance and amusement, and she doesn’t contend it any further. 

—

“I have slept with every single one of my PAs,” he tells her one day over breakfast. Well, _ his _ aborted version of breakfast, which consists of what must be a pint of Turkish coffee and whatever leftovers he can get his hands on - today it’s the Indian takeout he ordered two nights ago.

Pepper has a headache. This is not a new occurrence - there is something about being around Tony that makes her feel like she’s having volts of electricity shot straight into the center of her skull; also, he is a pain 75% of the time - but it is especially bad today, and it’s really not helping her figure out what to feel in response to that.

“Should I be offended by that?” she says after a pause. Her fingers curl around the stack of files she has in her hands - files he was supposed to sign maybe four months ago.

He props one leg up against his knee and shifts so he’s facing her. “Are you?”

She deigns not to point out how annoying it is when he answers every question she asks him with one of his own. Also, she’s not sure if she is or not, and she realizes very quickly she doesn’t want to figure it out, so she just sighs and sets the files down in front of him.

“I need you to sign these, Mr. Stark,” she says calmly, setting a pen down on the stack and sliding it towards him.

He blinks at her once, expression unreadable, and then takes it, opening the first folder and squinting down at the contract. “What’s on the agenda for today, Miss Potts?”

And it’s like the conversation never even happened.

—

Being his personal assistant is much like it was that one day in the middle of January. A lot of running around, a lot of tracking him down and cajoling him into doing all the things he needs to do with the help of coffee, Burger King, and relentless pestering. 

He is nothing like anyone she’s ever met before - off the walls, all over the place, hyperactive, a genius, just a few shades away from being a douchebag, smarmy, quick-witted, charming, hilarious - whether intentionally or not remained to be seen - and shockingly kind at times. He grates on her nerves at every available opportunity, never sleeps - as far as she can tell - and spends every waking moment that he can in his workshop building god-knows what. Everything he owns is run by some artificial intelligence named after his childhood butler, Edwin Jarvis. Both his parents are dead - killed in a car accident in the 90s. He loves his mother very deeply. She loved making clothes and writing in her spare time. She played the piano better than Mozart - his words, not hers - and was a fantastic cook. _ He _ is not a fantastic cook. He likes takeout and fast food. He doesn’t smoke, but he drinks enough for Pepper to genuinely worry about the state of his liver. His best friend is Air Force One Colonel James Rhodes who Tony seems intent on calling everything but his actual name. Honeybear, platypus, and sourpatch are popular ones. She meets the man a few times in the office. He is reserved, sharp, and stomach-achingly funny. She likes him a lot. So does Tony, in a genuine way that lights his whole face up and seems to remove the ten-ton weight he carries around with him at all time whenever he sees the man, so she likes him even more. 

—

The new job offers her a lot of opportunities. She has a full medical plan, plus every type of insurance under the sun. More vacation time and _ two _ offices to work at. Six figure pay. Yeah, a lot of opportunities.

Opportunities that include working on trade contracts with none other than Obadiah Stane for several hours one day. This is terrifying in a new way. Tony _ is _ the CEO of Stark Industries and undeniably the one with the most power, but it hadn’t taken Pepper long to figure out that the role Obadiah plays isn’t small, either. 

He puts her completely at ease, of course, and a part of her is unsettled at how easy it seems for him. The other part is just grateful that he hasn’t tried to look down her shirt yet in the three hours they’ve been there, so she lets it go.

“You know,” Obadiah says as he’s filing away the documents they’ve drafted up. “You’ve been a huge help with this. Seriously.”

Pepper smiles and ducks her head. “Thank you, Mr. Stane. It was an honor to get to work with you, really.”

He waves a hand. “_Nah_. Don’t mention it.” The man sits back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head, and stares her up and down. It’s not the usual up-and-down look from businessmen she gets that makes her want to break someone’s nose, but rather an assessment. Sort of like how Tony looks at her sometimes. Only Obadiah’s gaze is clinical and factual - he is mentally jotting down her strengths and weaknesses, things that are important to remember about her and things that can be discarded and filing all the notes away - whereas Tony’s is always blistering and makes her feel like he’s taking her brain apart piece by piece, studying each neuron and atom individually. “You know,” Obadiah says, after a pause. “If you’re ever looking for work -”

“Who? Who’s looking for work?”

As if on cue, Tony reappears - he had been off staring vacantly out the window for the majority of their meeting, more still than Pepper had ever seen him - at her elbow, frowning down at Obadiah.

“I was - propositioning,” Obadiash says with a grin. “In case Pepper ever feels like she needs a change of pace.”

“She’s _ my _ PA,” Tony says, shifting so that he’s halfway standing between her and Obadiah. The gesture reads as almost protective, and something about that makes Pepper smile. “Hands off, Mr. Stane.”

Obadiah just grins. “You’re a lucky man, Tony,” is all he says.

She feels Tony’s gaze burning into the back of her neck and she turns instinctively to meet it. It’s filled with something heavy and searing and a little raw around the edges and almost makes Pepper step back.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice is miraculously small and steady. “I am.”

—

She doesn’t hate her job at all. That’s what everyone told her the second she dropped the news that she was being promoted past at least seventeen levels of assistants and sub-assistants and sub-sub-assistants to the role of Tony Stark’s PA - _ give it a week and you’ll hate the man. Give it a month. _

But weeks and months pass, and she still doesn’t hate him. Or her job. 

It is aggravating on the best of days. Tony is like a child, really. He does things when he wants, how he wants, and why he wants. Pepper would have better luck sawing off her arm with a toothpick than forcing Tony into a board meeting he didn’t want to attend, or getting him to review business propositions or attend galas he doesn’t care about. Most of her job is still spent fielding calls and making apologies and organizing press conferences to make even more apologies and haranguing Tony over the phone, via email, face-to-face about the billion and one things he needs to do. He is snarky and downright rude sometimes. He jokes about firing her enough to stress her out severely. He refuses to attend most functions, preferring to spend his time holed up in his workshop or off at one of the various clubs he likes to frequent. He spends entirely too much money - not that that’s an issue, really; god only knows how wealthy that man is, but it still stresses her out. One time he had her order a $7,500 suit only to trash it the next evening. She has to remind him to eat and sleep at least six times a week. Sometimes shower, too. He shows up for work late a lot. Sometimes he doesn’t show up at all. 

She can feel herself aging years in the space of months with him. He is, without a doubt, one of the more frustrating people she’s ever met 

But she couldn’t say she hated him if there was a gun to her head. Oddly enough, as time passes, she realizes there’s no other job she’d rather be working. 

—

“I’m sick.”

“You are not sick. Jarvis, is Mr. Stark sick?”

“All of sir’s vitals are stable and indicate he is healthy, Miss Potts.”

Tony, from his position spread out across the couch, shoots the ceiling a dirty glare. “Traitor.”

“She did ask, sir.”

Pepper sighs, trying not to smile, and folds her hands in front of her. It is seven in the morning on a Wednesday and, honestly, it’s an outright miracle Tony is even awake at this hour, much less coherent, but she’s going to need more than a miracle to get him to go to the board meeting he has made her reschedule six times now. 

“You’re not sick,” she repeats sternly, hovering over him.

Tony removes the arm he’s draped across to give her an offended stare. His eyes are bright and sharp and sparkle in the overhead light. “I am,” he insists, brows drawing together in the beginning of a pout. “Javris is - stupid, that’s all.”

“Jarvis is smarter than seventeen of you, Mr. Stark -”

_ “Ouch.” _

“- and, for the final time, you are not sick. You have a board meeting in an hour. Happy will be here in fifteen minutes to pick you up and I really hope you are not planning on attending like _ that.” _

Tony spreads his arms to reveal his oversized MIT sweater. There are holes at the edges of the sleeves and some dark brown stains around the collar that are probably blood. For added effect, his hair is sticking up in nearly every direction possible, some parts standing up vertically, and he is only wearing one sock. 

“What’s wrong with this?” he protests, lips quirking up into a smile. Pepper doesn’t bother to conceal her eye roll.

“Fifteen minutes,” she says, tapping the watch on her wrist. “Up and at ‘em.”

He groans, dropping his arm back across his face. “No.”

“Mr. Stark -”

“Cancel it. Reschedule it. Tell them I’m - incarcerated. Wait, no, say my liver fell out of my body -”

“That honestly might be believable.”

“- or that I’m - I don’t know. Not interested in kissing their asses.”

“Mr. -”

“_No.” _

_ “Tony -” _

He freezes solid at that, slowly removing his arm from his face to stare at her, and it takes Pepper a second to realize it’s because she’s been working for him for god-knows how long now and she still hadn’t ever called him by his first name. 

_ Oh. _

Suddenly Pepper would like to be anywhere but here. Literally anywhere. She clears her throat, folds her hands some more, and turns away, heading back to her office. 

“Fifteen minutes,” she repeats over her shoulder. She can feel his gaze on her the entire time. 

—

He doesn’t end up going. Pepper makes excuses and calls on his behalf and pretends to be angry with him for all of three hours because she knows that if she doesn’t react, Tony will take it as her giving him the say-so to act like a child and cancel all his meeting because _ he doesn’t want to go _ a hundred more times. Her revolve crumbles epically when he calls her down to his workshop to ramble about his newest project while perched atop his workbench, tossing grapes into his mouth.

She figures it’s the closest thing she’ll ever get to an apology from him and, even though she should be mad, even though she should sit him down and carefully explain that rational, functional adults do the things they’re supposed to do even when they don’t want to, she isn’t and she doesn’t. She lets him eat his grapes and talk her ears off and cajole her into staying for dinner.

It’s late and she’s watching him wash the dishes and bicker with Jarvis, turning to grin at her each time he makes a particularly snappy comeback, that she realizes she’s sort of glad he didn’t go to the meeting, too.

—

“Where’d you go to college again, Potts?”

It’s midday. Tony is nursing a glass of something that she hopes is water but is likely anything but. Vodka, maybe. There’s a pen sticking out from behind his ear and he’s up to his neck in business statements and tax referrals. It’s ‘spring cleaning time,’ he explained to her when she walked into his office that morning to find him having not slept the entire night - whatever that means - so Pepper took it upon herself to help him sort through the papers. 

“Stanford, Mr. Stark,” she says, stapling a stack together and pushing it to the side. 

“What’d you study?”

“Public relations and business administration.”

“Double major? Damn. Impressive.”

“Yes, well.” She tabs one of the bank statements that has _ IMPORTANT _ scrawled on the upper left corner and sets it on her other side. “I certainly didn’t get admitted into MIT at age fifteen.”

He looks up from his papers and grins a little at her. “I’m sure you could’ve,” he says, and the confidence in his voice floors her.

She just snorts a little and grabs the hole punch

—

The first time she has to pick him up from a bar is one of the worst nights of her life. 

She’s been working for Tony for over a year now. Typical stuff for a PA, mostly. Filing, faxing, calling, organizing, apologizing, more calling, buying, selling, storing, categorizing, streamlining, promoting, more apologizing, the whole lot. She gets him lunch - and dinner - often. She does his dry cleaning and takes out his trash. She has cleaners come to his house every so often, more to make sure that he hasn’t somehow trashed the place than anything else. She does his taxes and knows all his passwords and has frequent arguments with Jarvis. She’s been to his house so much that she jokes it’s basically hers, now, and _ he _ jokes that he should set up a space in the guest room for her. She has everything from his social security number to Starbucks order to email password to overwrite codes for the lock on his workshop door memorized. 

But it still takes them over a year for her to get the call one time in the middle of the night from Happy Hogan. 

“What?” she mumbles into the phone. She shoves herself into a sifting position, forcefully keeping her eyes open in the darkness. “Wha’s going on?”

“Boss needs you,” says the man. His voice is tense in the way that tells her _ boss needs you _ means Tony’s in trouble and needs _ help _, not that he’s gotten a sudden craving for an In-N-Out milkshake and can’t be bothered to drive himself over there, and suddenly she’s wide awake.

It’s 3:16 in the morning. Pitch-black outside. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks, kicking off the covers and jumping out of bed. She debates changing, debates against it, and then finally relents, tugging her shirt and sweats off in favor of a button-up and pencil she’d laid out for the next morning. 

It’s 3:17 now. 3:17 and god knows what Tony’s done this time. 

“I just got a call from him,” Happy says as she throws on her shoes. “I’d pick him up, usually, but I’m out of town.”

“France, right?” she says, sighing. Of course. 

“Yeah. He’s - he’s drunk, Pepper. He’s gonna get hurt, or do something stupid, or drink some more and - I don’t know. It’s not - predictable. Look, I just - can you -?”

“On my way,” Pepper says, answering his unspoken question without blinking. She’s not even that shocked at how easily she agrees at this point. “Where’s he at?”

Happy gives her the location of some bar she’s vaguely heard of downtown. One of Tony’s favorites, she thinks as she climbs into the car and speeds off. Of course. 

She breaks at least sixteen rules of the road trying to get to Tony and, every time a wash of nervousness hits her at how truly awful her driving is right now and how she could definitely get a ticket, or arrested, she remembers the sharp fear in Happy’s voice and pictures Tony lying in a ditch somewhere, out of his mind and hurt and vulnerable, and she floors it. 

She arrives at the club in under twenty minutes. The sidewalk beside her is glowing blue and purple. She can feel the bass pounding through the floor of the car. 

Tony is lying five feet away from the club entrance with his head half in the gutter. She can see him as she pulls up. 

“Potts!” he exclaims as she walks up to him, heels clacking on the sidewalk. He’s alone and there’s some blood on the corner of his mouth. He sits up as she approaches.“You - hi - wh’ - what’re you doing here?”

He smells sour. His pupils are blown out and, even as he stays seated, she can see him swaying a little. 

“We’re going home.” Is all she says, crouching down to slip her hands under his arms and tug him to his feet. He collapses into her, slinging one of his arms around her shoulders and staggering as he tries to stay upright. 

“D’n’t wanna - wanna,” he mutters, but allows himself to be walked to the car all the same. “Want - more - c’mon, Potts -”

Suddenly his weight goes dead as he doubles over and drops to his knees. He coughs once - a loud, jagged sound - before throwing up into the gutter. 

His breathing is shaking. She runs a hand up and down his spine, muttering what she hopes is soothing nothingness. 

Tony throws up again. His face is white and shining with sweat. He looks up at her, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, like he doesn’t know who she is. 

His next breath sound suspiciously like a sob. Then he throws up again, then they’re in the car with his head lolling against the dash, eyes not quite closed enough for him to be asleep as she barrels down the road back to his house. 

At one point he takes her hand and squeezes it. It seems like an almost unconscious gesture - god knows he’s out of it enough where it easily could be - but his grip is determined and strong, like he knows exactly what he’s doing. 

He doesn’t, though, and she knows it, so she just squeezes back and focuses very hard on not crying. She makes a right at an intersection and watches as Tony’s face flashes different colors with the stop lights above them. The shadows under his eyes have only deepened since their first meeting.

Ten minutes later and he’s in bed. His snoring fills the room. 

Pepper washes her face in his bathroom. Breathes in and out a few times. 

Her clothes smell like vodka and sweat. Her hands won’t stop shaking for some reason, which is bizarre. This shouldn’t be anything new to her. She knows Tony drinks. She’s known this since the day she met him; she’s been there for every single hangover and every single bout of day drinking since he hired her. She’s thrown the bottles that sometimes accumulate in his office or bedroom out periodically, often enough so people don’t start to notice. She’s called the AA hotline several times, never getting more than five minutes into a conversation with one of the workers, never being able to say the words “I think my boss drinks too much” without her throat closing like a vice. She _ knows _ Tony drinks, sometimes a lot. This is nothing new. 

Maybe that’s why her hands are shaking so much. 

She spends the next five hours sitting in his bedside chair. When the sun finally goes up, she leaves a glass of water and two painkillers out for him and heads to work. 

—

The next time she has to pick him up, he’s unconscious by the time they make it to his house. 

For what feels like a lifetime but is probably only twenty minutes, max, she thinks he’s not breathing. 

She doesn’t know what to do. She has no idea what to do. 

She calls James Rhodes - Rhodey to his friends. She’s not sure if the two of them are friends, but, at that point, her breath is rasping in her throat out of sheer panic and the breath she _ can _ feel on the back of her hand as she waves it under Tony’s nose is dangerously faint and the woman he had been with said she had lost count of how many shots he’s had after the tenth one, so she calls him. He might not be her friend, but he is Tony’s, so she calls him. 

He shows up without any questions at two in the morning. They went to MIT together - Tony was only fifteen. Rhodey says that’s when this all started - saying _ this _ with a sort of vague, sweeping hand gesture and tight expression around his eyes. He looks exhausted, and a million apologies spill out of People's lips before she can stop herself. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, hating how much her voice shakes. “I’m sorry about this.”

Rhodey runs a hand through Tony’s hair. It’s damp with sweat. Tony’s eyes are half-open and glassy, incoherent mumbles falling from his lips. He presses his face into Rhodey’s open palm and makes a noise that sounds a little like a whimper. His breath is shaky and Pepper can feel something inside her chest cracking in two. 

“It’s not your fault,” the colonel says softly. 

“It’s not his, either.”

They get Tony into bed. He falls asleep after a few seconds, breathing finally leveling out. 

Rhodey tells her to go, and she does. She heads home and collapses on her living room floor, hands still shaking. 

She spends the rest of the night waiting for an inevitable phone call - from Rhodey, from Happy, from the hospital - saying the worst. 

It doesn’t come. She still doesn’t sleep, though. 

—

“You know, I should get you a bell. So that way, when you come to - _ harangue _me about something, I can run and hide.”

She just snorts and drops the latest pile of paperwork on the table in front of him. He looks up from the circuit board he was stabbing with a wrench to give her a gaze full of offense. 

“As much as I enjoy the prospect of being turned into a veritable house cat -”

“It’d just be a _bell;_ don’t be so overdramatic -”

“- I don’t think that would be very successful. I know all your hiding places.”

He grins up at her, head tipping to the side a little. He always looks at he like he’s seeing her for the first time and trying to reframe her face into his memory, and she’s never sure how to feel about it. 

“That you do, Miss Potts,” he says, pulling the paperwork towards him without breaking eye contact. “And that’s why I love you.”

—

Pepper knows Tony’s parents are dead.

She knows this because everyone who knows about Tony Stark knows this. The deaths of Maria and Howard Stark were some of the most widely reported ones of the decade. If the name Stark wasn’t already a household one before their accident, it certainly was after. Pepper had been 19 at the time at the time of the infamous accident. She had seen the broadcast on a boxy little television propped up against the wall of the diner she had been working at over the holidays. It had been all anyone had talked about at college for the next three and a half months 

Point is, Pepper knows Tony’s parents are dead. But she did not know - couldn’t remember, more like - when they had died, so the first anniversary she’s at the mansion for - a combination of coincidences and Tony-orchestrated plans had always kept her either home or at the office this day - sneaks up on her and practically smacks her over the back of the head. 

December 16th rolls around and, like most of her days, Pepper needs Tony to do something right now and he has, helpfully enough, made himself scarce. The particular something in question this time involves him signing off on some contracts Obadiah had sent to her. Each one of them has URGENT stamped out across the front in big red letters and, like so many other things, Pepper cannot shake the fear that if she does not get Tony to do this immediately, she’ll be out at the drop of a hat. 

So she wanders around the mansion, simultaneously calling his name and wondering why his house has to be so goddamn_ big _ for a while before figuring he must be down in the workshop. She heads down the stairs, heels cracking against the stone, and lets herself in. 

Then freezes solid. 

Tony is half-sitting, half-laying on the floor. There are at least three empty scotch bottles surrounding him. His knuckles are bleeding. His face is completely blank. His eyes look like two vacant holes in the center of his face and, for one horrible second, Pepper thinks he’s dead. 

Then he grunts, stirring, and looks up at her. 

His face is emotionless, which in itself is horrifying, because Tony’s face is a lot of things, but emotionless has never been one of them. He is an expressive person - he wears every feeling he has on his face, hidden among the subtleties of eyebrow raises and lip twitches and head tilts. She thinks that’s why he wears sunglasses so much, even inside - especially inside, sometimes; they serve as a means of protection for him. 

But his face is blank now, and he’s staring at her like he’s never seen her, and Pepper has no idea what to do. 

There are streaks of blood on the couch he’s sort of propped up against. Beside him, there’s a visible dent in the plaster of the wall. 

He coughs once, and somehow that spurs Pepper into action. She discards the contracts and hurries over to him, no idea what she’s doing to do when she reaches him, but stops as he holds up a hand and slowly raises himself to his feet. 

His eyes are glassy when they meet hers. 

“Saw your file,” he says slowly, and it’s a miracle how clear his voice sounds. She knows him enough by now to know he has not capped at three bottles. “Your parents are dead. How?”

Pepper’s father ran away with her mother’s sister when she was seven. It took Pepper’s mother three years to track the two of them down - three years which consisted of what Pepper has grown to fondly think of as The Roadtrip Across America From Hell. They had ran all the way from Wisconsin to south LA. Pepper’s mother, who had been taught to shoot by her own father at age twelve and could’ve been a sniper in the US army if she had at all cared about things like that, purchased a gun from a gas station when they were in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was a SIG Sauer P226, and Pepper had known enough about her mother at that point to refrain from asking why it was suddenly in the back seat of their car. It was with this very gun that Pepper’s mother marched into her father and aunt’s seedy apartment, aimed it right at their foreheads, and fired. Then, upon realizing what she had done, Pepper’s mother climbed out the fire escape and back into the car. She made it ten minutes down the road before getting into a wreck. 

Pepper had been sitting out in the hallway when this had happened. She could barely remember anything from that day except for a lot of commotion and yelling, the persisting smell of bleach and stale whiskey, and the flickering hallway light above her that she had watched as people - police, family members, medical professionals - flowed by in an endless stream until her eyes started to burn. 

She does not particularly enjoy thinking about that day, all the same, though. But Tony looks so tired and she can see cracks of desperation and anguish peeking through his mask of blankness and something heavy inside her twists. She is used to Tony’s face and its endless emotional range, but there is something about the way the pain sits on it - jagged and heavy and raw and _ real _ \- that makes her chest crumple like a discarded soda can. She doesn’t want him to look like that, like the weight of the world is resting on his shoulders and he doesn’t even know how to stand. Not now, not ever

So she folds her hands in front of her like her grandmother - who took her in after the apartment incident - taught her when she didn’t know what to do with them and stares him dead in the eye. 

“My father had an affair with my aunt. He ran off with her. My mother tracked him down and then shot him and her sister. She tried to run away and got into a car crash and died. I was ten.”

Tony looks at her for an impossibly long time. The rawness in his gaze makes her want to cry, which is odd, considering the fact that she is now twenty six and she has not cried over her parents in maybe a decade. Maybe she’s not crying for herself, though.

Regardless, to stave that off, she springs back into action and drags Tony to the bathroom. She sits him down on the toilet and carefully washes his knuckles off, dabbing at the open cuts with antiseptic and letting him grab onto her knee and squeeze it wordlessly when it starts to sting. Her hands shake as she bandages his knuckles, but so do his, too, and some sort of unspoken agreement passes between them to not mention it. In that way, they are extraordinarily similar - they are both composed of walls and barriers and failsafes to keep themselves in prime, functioning condition. At any rate, weaknesses are certainly not things Pepper herself likes to display, but she can’t help thinking now, perched on the edge of the bathtub with Tony’s knees jamming into her legs and the sound of his shaky, rasping breath filling the bathroom and the smell of scotch in the air, that if there is anyone she had to have a weakness in front of right now, she’s glad it’s him. 

—

He drops by her office - her real office; the one at Stark Industries - the next day. His face is apologetic - Pepper can’t shake the wash of relief that comes with the realization that at least it isn’t scarily blank aymore - and his injured hand is carefully stuffed into one of his pockets.

“Hi,” she says as he comes in and stops in the center of the carpet, frowning.

“Hi.” He’s not meeting her gaze, which is new. He always does. Even when he’s drunk out of his mind or barely conscious or she’s breathing down his neck about the twelve thousand things she needs him to do or calling him an asshole, he looks her in the eyes. It’s one of the more unnerving things about him, and Pepper’s not sure how to feel about the lack of this characteristic, so she doesn’t. 

“Is everything okay?” she says slowly. He looks lost and confused and, for a second, Pepper wonders if he’s taken something.

But then he blinks, gaze sharpening a little, and she’s able to relax. At least he’s not that much of an idiot, then.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says. He sounds like he’s choosing each word carefully, which is new for him, too, but there’s a first time for everything. Pepper’s not sure why she wants him to look at her so bad. 

Pepper presses her lips together and nods. “It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She is. So much so that it sort of scares her. She hadn’t really realized until last night how dependent her own happiness is on his sometimes, which is an awful thing, because she knows many things about Tony Stark, and the fact that his happiness is so rarely long term.

“Your parents.” He frowns, staring at the corner of her desk with extreme interest. “I’m really sorry about that. I - yeah.”

Pepper allows herself a minor facial twitch in response to the heavy feeling that passes through her at the mention of her parents before nodding again. “It was a long time ago, Mr. Stark. It’s okay.”

He nods back. She can see the muscles in his jaw working. He looks tired and lost and scared and Pepper hates it so, so much.

“Okay,” he says, then turns on his heel and leaves. 

She doesn’t see him for the rest of the day and, to her credit, she does a great job of pretending she doesn’t care.

—

He brings her a smoothie on her next birthday - those are the one thing he is good at making. It has pineapple, banana, mango, and passion fruit in it. It’s delicious. She has been working for him for years, and it’s the first time he’s ever gotten her birthday right. 

He also gives her a small gift along with the beverage. It’s a jewelry box and inside there’s a silver necklace with a moon on the end. It’s studded with what looks like diamonds and probably cost more than her entire apartment. 

“Reciet’s on the back,” Tony says with a crooked grin. “In case you hate it. Get something nice for yourself if you do, though. I won’t be offended.”

She doesn’t, though. She hangs the necklace up in her bathroom and stares at it for half an hour that night. It glints in the light, sending fractals of light onto the wall behind it, and Pepper wonders why looking at it for longer than six seconds makes her chest feel like it’s being run over. 

—

“Sign here. Now, please. I have H&R on hold.”

“Have I ever told you how sexy you are when you boss me around?”

She taps the contract. _ “Sign.” _

“Absolutely ravishingly. I could literally -”

She smacks him upside the head before he can finish, and leaves the workshop to the sound of his snickering in the background.

_ Idiot_, she thinks as she climbs the stairs. She’s still smiling, though. 

—

December rolls back around and, on the 15th, Tony goes missing. 

Pepper - following the disastrous events of the wall-punching incident - should’ve been on her guard. She should’ve been suspicious when Tony had drifted over to her office on the 13th and said to take the weekend off - not that that was suspicious behavior; Tony is the kind of boss who likes his employees to work even less than he does - but she wasn’t. She wasn’t and then he goes missing and she has a horrible feeling in the bottom of her stomach that this is all her fault.

They - the police - find him seventy two hours later, camped out in a cemetery upstate surrounded by half-dead flowers and three smashed bottles of scotch. 

She picks him up from the station without his asking. Maybe he’d rather see Happy, or Rhodey, or Obadiah, but it’s been three days and she’s barely slept or ate and all she can think is she just wants - _ needs_, really - to see him alive and breathing and not lying dead in a ditch somewhere. If that can happen, things can go back to being okay again. 

It’s raining as he climbs into the passenger seat in silence. His hair is wet and his lips are tinged blue and she can see him shivering, despite the heavy blanket the police gave him before she arrived. There’s cuts lining the side of his cheek. His eyes are bloodshot. She can see a muscle in his jaw working as they drive home. She closes her eyes as she merges onto the main freeway for a second and all she can see is Tony drunk and alone, Tony smashing scotch bottles on his parents’ headstones, Tony’s face being sliced to shreds by the glass, Tony crying, Tony alone, Tony dead in a ditch somewhere, and suddenly she’s so angry she can barely see straight. 

He could’ve died. He could’ve _ died_. 

“Don’t you _ ever _ pull something like that again,” she snaps into the silence. “Ever fucking again. Understand me?”

Her hands shake as she merges lanes and, god, he could’ve _ died_. He could’ve drank himself to death or gotten hypothermia or arrested or kidnapped and killed by some passing lunatic. Tony could’ve _ died_. 

And suddenly she’s not angry anymore. She’s so scared it feels like her chest is caving in. 

“I’m sorry,” Tony mutters beside her. 

They drive the rest of the way in silence. 

—

“Is your real name _ really _ Virginia?”

Tony asks her this question frequently. It’s a point of great interest to him - something Pepper finds, as with so many things about Tony, somewhere between amusing and annoying and endearing. He asks her this question most frequently at very inconvenient times, usually when she is trying to get him to do something he does not want to do. Right now it’s the benefit gala he is supposed to be attending next Tuesday. 

“The invitation, Mr. Stark,” she says, holding out the green and white card for him to see, like he’s going to even spare it a glance. 

He doesn’t, of course. He tips his head to the side, resting his chin on the back of his hand. “You have this very annoying habit where you completely ignore my questions all the time.”

“I only ignore the stupid ones, Mr. Stark.”

“But you do it _ all the time_.”

She spreads her free hand out. “Then there you have it.”

Tony snorts, then slaps an expression of mock-offense across his face. “That was incredibly rude.”

“I’m sorry,” she deadpans, waving the invitation at him a little. “You need to go. You don’t even have to bring a date this time.”

He’s, as usual, ignoring her. “I could fire you for that,” he says, eyebrow raising a little. He won’t, of course, and they’re at the point where this is an openly acknowledged fact in between them. Still, he gets a kick out of threatening to - normally when she is making him do things; she‘s given up trying to communicate that that is the literal point of her job by now - and she gets a kick out of reminding him how downhill his life would go if she wasn’t around to keep it together. 

“You’re right,” he says after she finishes her reminder. His face is completely serious but there’s a smile in his eyes and Pepper feels her stomach flip-flop a little. “I would be completely lost without you.”

She huffs and tries not to smile. She’s not interested in knowing if it worked or not. “That is correct. Now, the gala…”

—

December rolls around again and, even though it’s been two years since his last disappearing act, she still keeps waiting for it to happen again, from the inevitable call from Happy or Rhodey or the police that this is it, he’s gone again and they don’t have a clue as to where. 

It never comes. Instead, Tony throws a Christmas party and invites her. She drinks too much wine and he stays stone cold sober. They exchange gifts. Tony got her a set of candles and some expensive-looking perfume. She got him a tie with little cats on it. The way that he looks at it, like it’s the most amazing thing he’s ever seen, makes her chest feel like it’s being pumped full of helium and she’s about to float away. 

“I adore this,” he says seriously, staring her dead in the eye. “I’m wearing this every single day.”

“Even to the grad party?” Rhodey says, grinning. He’s wearing a Christmas sweater Tony gave him earlier, adorned with ornaments and tiny crochet platypuses. 

Tony gives him a serious look that makes Pepper grin for some reason. _ “Especially _ to the grad party. All those airheads at MIT would be so mad if I did; how could I not?” He turns back to her, still smiling. “Thank you, Miss Potts. You have outdone yourself.”

She drinks some more wine and, before her better judgement can sneak back up on her and clout her over the head, she allows herself to be dragged to the dance floor by Tony. 

Someone puts on _ Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas_, the Frank Sinatra version. They slow dance, one of Tony’s hands carefully resting on the small of her back, the other on her shoulder. He smiles and laughs a lot and steps on her toes. 

“Sorry!” he says, wincing as it happens for the fourth time. “I’m lousy at this.”

“Never learnt?” she says, laughing a little. 

He shakes his head, smiling in a way that makes his whole face light up. “Nope. Dad wasn’t a fan of me getting lessons. Thought it would be unproductive.”

They dance some more. He steps on her toes three more times and apologizes each time it happens. She almost manages to forget that he is her boss and she is his PA and nothing will ever happen between them and that’s totally fine because she doesn’t even want it to; he’s her _ boss _ and she _ knows _ how he is with girls and it was just a dance brought on by a little too much to drink, that’s all. 

Or, that’s what she tells herself, at least. Later, when she’s been driven home and is lying in her own bed, the point it totally refuted when she realizes that if she had maybe one more glass of wine that night, she probably would’ve kissed him. 

—

“You’re very good at your job.”

She’s been trying to cajole him into getting a haircut for the past twenty minutes. He seems intent on letting his hair grow out to practically his shoulders - a statement, probably, or just another stab at driving her certifiably insane - and is having none of it. Instead he perches on a desk chair - _ her _ desk chair - and spins around every so often. 

“Thank you,” she says as calmly as she can. 

“Really good.” He stops the spinning to stare her dead in the eye. “You shouldn’t be working for me.”

“No?”

“No. You should be running this company, honestly.”

“You really think that, Mr. Stark?”

His face only grows more serious, and it’s times like these where she genuinely cannot tell if he’s pulling her leg or not. She’s like to think he isn’t, at least. 

“I do. I really do.”

—

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

It’s a joke and, to her credit, a passably funny one if they were in any situation other than this one. The situation - Tony half-conscious and slumped against the curb with sweat matting his hair and his clothes reeking of cheap vodka - has become a frequent sight over the past half a month. She’s not sure why, and she knows he won’t tell her if she asks, so she just lets the stab at humor hang heavy in the air around them and cross the sidewalk to help Tony to his feet. 

His hands are freezing, even though it’s the middle of summer and it has to be 80-something degrees outside. Not for the first time, a flower of panic blooms in her stomach and she wonders dazedly if he has alcohol poisoning as is going to die on the ride home and she should take him to hospital instead. But she knows he would say no and, if she pressed, things would get ugly in the way that they always do when she presses - with Tony yelling incoherently as she tries not to cry and swerve too hard - so she just helps him into the car and tries not to let her hands shake too much. 

“God,” she mutters as she buckles his seatbelt and passes a hand under his nose to make sure he’s still breathing. “Why do you _ do _ this?”

It’s not really a question directed at him - god knows he’s so out of it she’d be genuinely amazed if he could string more than five coherent words together. It’s more for whatever benevolent being is still looking down on her and feeling some ounce of sympathy for the fact that she has had to pick him up like this five times in the past two weeks, because it’s one of those nights where she hasn’t slept enough to keep a lid on her rampant self-pity. 

But Tony blinks open his eyes to stare at her as she’s pulling back. They’re bloodshot and shining, and Pepper’s not sure if it’s because of the drink or because he’s crying. The drink, most likely.

“Don’ know how else to do this,” he mutters, then swallows. “This - stuff. Can’t do it without this.”

And she vaguely wonders if there is a limit to how many times her heart can break for him. 

—

Sometimes Pepper hates her job. 

She hates it in an idealistic sense more often than not - meaning she really wishes she could look he reflection in the eyes and say the words “I hate this job” aloud and mean then - especially when Tony is being unhelpful or rude or deliberately avoiding his responsibilities. She sort of hates it - in a way that makes her more sad than anything - when she’s on Drunk-Tony Duty. 

The only time she _ really _ hates her job, though, is when she has to escort his one-night stands out the door. 

Tony sleeps around a lot. Big deal. She knows this about him - has known it since she was first hired. It’s no secret and maybe this particular task wasn’t written in big bold letters at the front of her job description - joke’s on her, really; she wasn’t even given a job description - but it shouldn’t surprise her. 

And it doesn’t. It makes her very angry. The sort of angry she can’t really explain. The sort of angry that means she can be in the same room as Tony after she shuts the door on whatever girl he dragged home the previous night without getting into a fight with him. 

Sometimes the girls are happy to go. Sometimes they’re cold and indifferent. Sometimes they’re disoriented, or upset, or lost-looking. Sometimes they’re angry - at Tony for being such a colossal jerkoff, but they see fit to take it out on her. She just smiles and ducks her head when this happens, silently wishing for something large and heavy to crash through the ceiling and land on her, killing her instantly. 

It never does, and Pepper allows herself a full hour of stapling and holepunching and aggressively filing to cool off the day she realizes that, as much as she hates it, this is her job, too, and it probably always will be. 

—

They’re at a charity function. It is nearing two in the morning and Pepper is so tired that her vision is starting to black-out at the edges. Tony is moderately sober, but in a horrible mood. She doesn’t know why and is too tired - and too in a bad mood of her own - to talk to him about it. Instead, she starts following him around as the evening wears on like she can stave off some sort of inevitable meltdown he’s probably going to have. It’s probably weird, but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. He just drifts from table to table, sipping his drink and staring around the crowd unblinkingly. 

At some point, some old guy in a tightly cut suit walks up to them. She can smell vodka on him from five feet away and he stares at her for just long enough to make her physically uncomfortable, so she removes herself from the conversation and goes to stand a couple of feet away, sipping her drink and tuning out whatever the man is saying to Tony.

The next thing she knows, there’s a loud burst of shuffling from behind her and she spins around to see Tony half-lunging at the man, hands outstretched like he wants to choke him out. 

Pepper puts herself in between the two of them, wrapping her hands around the lapels of Tony’s jacket and shoving him back. He tries to push forward, but she flattens one hand against his chest, and he stops suddenly. The man is laughing, and Tony’s eyes don’t leave his face as Pepper - wondering vaguely how her life has come to stopping her boss from strangling random old men at two in the morning - silently drags him out to the roofdeck.

“What is this, high school?” she finally snaps, dropping the lapel of his jacket and folding her arms. “Are you going to throw that guy up against a locker, or give him a _ wedgie_, or something? What, is it my job to physically _ restrain _ you from starting brawls at charity functions, now?”

He turns to the side, muscles in his jaw working. His face is tight and composed, mouth carefully constructed into a hard line and brow deliberately unfurrowed, but his eyes are blazing. Blazing more than she’s ever seen them and suddenly she’s glad he won’t look at her. She has the feeling that, if he did, he’d burn holes right through her face.

He looks down to his hand, suddenly. “Where’s my drink?” he mutters, closing his hand into a fist. She can see his knuckles going white. “I want a drink.”

If he’s like this tonight when he’s sober enough to drive, she really does not need to see what’s going to happen once he gets a glass of scotch or twelve in him. She shifts a little so she’s in between him and the door back inside, glaring at the side of his face he’s turned to her.

“What _was_ that?” she demands.

“Nothing.”

Sometimes she could really slap him. It might be good for her, honestly.

“Cut the bullshit,” she growls, and _ that _ makes him look at her, eyebrows arching up with surprise. She makes a point of not swearing around him - mostly to counteract the fact that _ he _ swears nearly every other word some days but also so that when she does he knows it’s because he’s really toed the line. “What was that?”

His eyebrows settle back into their earlier, controlled position. He sniffs. “What was what?”

She wants to slap him so bad she can physically feel the center of her palm itch. “You just jumped at that guy like you were going to beat him fifty shades of black and blue - who even was he? Why - what were you _ thinking? _ Do you know how much - _ shit _ we would have to deal with if he sued us?”

“Don’t care.”

“Of course you don’t,” she scoffs. Of _course_ he doesn’t. “But I do, because it will probably be me actually dealing with it, so you can make that inevitability up to me by answering my goddamn _question_, Tony.”

She can see him chewing the inside of his cheek. His eyes haven’t stopped burning. He blinks once and huffs a grating, humorless laugh. 

“He was having a go at my father,” Tony mutters, staring back down at his hands. “Fucking - search me as to why I - did that. Howard was -”

His mouth twists into an uncharacteristically ugly expression. 

“He was a piece of shit,” Tony finishes. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets and Pepper draws a breath, stepping back. They’re in uncharted waters here; Tony will talk his own ass off about his mother, but his father rarely gets an offhand mention. “He was a piece of shit and he drank and made _ me _ drink and now I’m a grade-a fucking alcoholic and he beat me up and I’m pretty sure he beat my mom up when I was away and he was mean and cold and cruel and I think I might have hated him. And I still -” Tony swipes a hand through the air with another bitter laugh. “- fucking _ defend _ him. Put him on his fucking pedestal and - _ god _ -”

His voice shakes at the end and he turns his back on her abruptly. They stand like that for a long time, Tony facing the ledge of the roof deck, Pepper facing him, both silent. 

Finally, he turns back to her. His face is blank. 

“I’d like to go home now,” he says. His voice is soft as he reaches a hand out to her and stops before they make contact. “Pepper, please.”

She closes the distance, grabbing into his elbow - not his hand because that’s too real and too much and neither of them are in the right place for that - and carefully steers him towards the door. His hand grabs onto her side as they pass by crowds of people, all talking and drinking and yelling, and, all of a sudden, he looks so incredibly afraid. 

—

“Does it bother you that I sleep with men sometimes?”

Pepper, who had just finished escorting Tony’s latest nighttime guest out the door - a rather bemused looking man with a crop of sandy blonde hair who’s shoulder Pepper just came up to - and is now trying to salvage some breakfast for herself - and not get irrationally angry about the fact that there is never any normal food in his fridge - turns to see Tony standing in the doorway. He’s dressed in a snakeskin print bathrobe and his hair has been flattened down awkwardly. 

She closes the fridge. “Do you remember his name?”

He seems to think very hard about this for a second. “Jared?”

“Nice try. Jason, actually. That’s closer than you normally get.”

“In my defense, I was very drunk,” he says slowly. She can see his hands clenching and unclenching in the robe pockets. “But does it bother you?”

“It bothers me that you feel morally decent abandoning all of your one-night stands to hover around the kitchen in ridiculously tacky bathrobes while I have to escort them out of the house, yes.”

He looks supremely apologetic, but doesn’t apologize, which is a thing he does a lot sometimes. She’s over it at this point. “Pepper.”

Something about the weird urgency in his voice makes her stop digging around the cupboards and face him, folding her hands in front of her. 

“Your sex life is none of my business,” she says, because sometimes she needs a reminder. “So my opinion on this matter isn’t really important. But does it bother me that sometimes there are guys in your bedroom instead of girls? Not at all. It’s a completely normal, okay thing. Some men sleep with women, and some men sleep with men, and some men do both. I don’t see why anyone should have an issue with that.”

He looks deeply relieved, whole face loosening into a smile. “My robe is not tacky,” he announces after a fraction, stepping into the kitchen and huffing a little. His voice is the exact nature of petulant required to bring humor back into the conversation, and she can’t help but smile. 

She allows herself an eye roll, too. “Of course, Mr. Stark. Whatever you say.”

“You’re just jealous,” he informs her, and Pepper feels her smile slip of her face in an instant. Tony, the ball of blissful ignorance that he is, is too busy raiding the fridge and starting to ramble on about what he wants to order for dinner to notice. 

—

An article in the Daily Bugle is published one day, calling nearly everything about her into question. It attacks her intelligence, her professionalism, her ability to do her job properly, the fact that she’s probably sleeping with her boss, all of it. It’s so outrageous she’s be amazed if even her most ardent critics believed a word of it. 

Pepper honestly thinks the article the funniest thing on the planet. Tony doesn’t even blink before filing a lawsuit for slander.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she says for the fourth time that evening.

Tony’s face, which has been permanently screwed up into a frown ever since he read the article, turns to her. His grip is tight around his glass. 

“They shouldn’t have said that shit,” he tells her.

He’s right - they shouldn't have - but she’s known people have been making conjectures about her relationship with Tony for years now in private, and she’s just glad it was brought to the public threshold in the wildly unreliable source that is the Daily Bugle. Better that than the New York Times, she figures.

“No, they shouldn’t have,” she agrees lightly. “But you still didn’t have to sue. It might look suspicious. Plus, Obadiah will probably be mad.”

“Fuck Obie,” Tony says empathetically, knocking back a mouthful of whatever’s in his glass. “Also, fuck the press.”

“They’re allowed to say what they want to say. It doesn’t bother me.”

“It should.”

She’s almost surprised by the levels of anger she can feel pouring off of him. The energy seems to fizzle in the air around him, emitting tiny almost-lightning bolts around his face as he glowers at the article, still sitting folded up on the table in front of them.

“Tony,” she says slowly, and that clears his gaze a little. “I’ve been working in corporate settings since I got out of college. I have been called every name under the sun and had all sorts of accusations and insinuations thrown my way, and that was before I started working as your PA. I’m used to stuff like that by now. Reacting only gives people the satisfaction of knowing they got to you.”

She can feel Tony seething as he ponders this, staring vacantly into his glass. “I’m still suing,” he says after a pause. “No one should think they can talk about you like that and get away with it. No one.”

She lets it go. It’s one of those losing battles, anyways.

—

“Tony? Tony, I’ve been calling you for the last ten minutes. I really need you to look over these contracts one more time before I send them off to the board. Obadiah said to revisit the third and fourth ones; he thinks -”

Whatever Obadiah thinks that he told Pepper to pass onto Tony dies on her lips as she enters the kitchen and catches sight of Tony. He’s standing by the sink, back to her, but he turns as she enters the room. His hair has been blown back off, sticking almost diagonally off his head, and his whole face has been blackened - _ something_. Soot, probably. Panic shoots through her, making her head spin, and he just smiles, spreading his hands out and walking towards her a little.

“Like the new look?” he asks, gesturing to his face. “I feel like I should go to our next function like this. Thoughts?”

“Are - oh my god, are you _ okay?” _ she asks, tossing the contracts aside and hurrying over towards him. If he’s hurt himself she is actually going to murder him.

“Perfectly fine,” he announces, grinning at her. His teeth stand out stark-white against his blackened face. “There was a mild explosion -”

“A _ mild explosion?” _

“- and it really wasn’t even my fault this time. DUM-E was being stupid -”

_ “DUM-E _ was being stupid? You’re the one who lets your robots run your lab.”

He frowns at her for half a second before the grin reassumes its position. “I’m fine,” he repeats. “You can stop going all mother-hen on my ass.”

She slaps his shoulder, and his expression morphs into one of mock hurt. 

“Get into the shower,” she instructs, nudging him in the direction of the stairs leading up to his bathroom. “You’re getting soot everywhere.”

“Actually, it’s not soot, it’s a _ carbon-iron _ compound -”

_ “Now.” _

“Yes, dear.”

—

He has seen her cry once. 

It was on the anniversary of her father’s death - she refuses to allow her mother the decency of sharing that day with him which is probably a little unfair and more than a little unhealthy, but she still finds herself royally unbothered. It was on the anniversary of her father’s death and she hadn’t even realized it until halfway through a conference call with some executive in New York. She had started to zone out and executive the executive had not taken that very kindly. He had interrupted his own tirade about stocks and market prices and seizing assets to ask her if Tony Stark actively looked for assistants who were all, to quote, “dumb sluts,” before hanging up on her. 

She suspects he was drunk. Or just that shitty of a person. Either way, it doesn’t really matter because the second she lets the reviver drop down, her eyes are watering and her throat is closing up and her head is starting to spin in the way it does when she holds her sobs in. 

_ I want to go home, _she thinks before realizing that she has not had a place she could identify as home nearly her whole life, and she is so fucking alone because of it - or maybe because that’s just how she was built; to be alone - and that makes her cry even harder. 

There’s a knock on her office door and, before she can do anything, it opens and Tony walks in with a mug of coffee and a pen between his teeth. He stops short as he catches sight of her and the pen drops to the ground. 

She presses a hand into her face and inhales forcefully. Every atom in her chest feels like it’s being ripped apart. She wants to go home. She wants to find home and go there and have things just be okay but that is not happening because she is crying in front of her boss and he is either about to run away or ask her what’s wrong and she’s honestly not sure which one would be worse. 

In the end, he leaves, only because she waves him away with an erratic, wordless sweep of her hand. She’s certain that if she opens her mouth she will start audibly crying and then he never will leave and she will have to quit on a matter of principle. 

She meets him down in the kitchen an hour later. He’s reading the paper and grunts his greeting to her from over the top of the finance section. There’s a mug of earl grey tea sitting in front of her usual seat, and she takes it without saying anything. Her throat is still hoarse. 

They don’t mention the incident again. 

—

He forgets her birthday very often. 

The only time he actually remembered on the day was the time he brought her the smoothie and necklace and, even though he is her boss and she should not care about things like this, she does. Very much. It annoys her past the ability to describe it when he blinks in surprise, staring at her from across the kitchen or living room or office and asks “has it been your birthday yet?” two months after the fact.

“You’re mad,” he says, frowning at her. 

“I’m not mad.”

“Yes, you are.” He stabs at a piece of broccoli and stares at it for a second like it’s fascinating before looking back to her, frowning harder. She has, by now, learned the many varied frowns he has. This one is his confused one. She sees it a lot in situations like this - when he is being a colossal idiot and she is unable to stop herself from being short with him because of it. “Why?”

She’s trying to do paperwork. He’s giving her a headache. Her boss is sitting across the kitchen table from her, eating a box of Chinese takeout while she is doing the work _ he _ was supposed to do three days ago. She wonders if her high school homeroom teacher, who was very old and undeniably dead now and spent a lot of time lecturing her about how she had _ ideas that were too big, Virgina_, can see her now. He’s probably laughing his ass off.

“I’m not mad,” she repeats carefully. 

“That’s what people say when they’re mad.”

She strongly resists the urge to throw her pen at him.

“Have I done something?” he asks, frown turning more into a worried expression. He actually sounds hurt, and something inside Pepper softens at his tone. She doesn’t feel like being mad at him, all of a sudden.

A part of Pepper sometimes worries that he holds too much sway over her. It’s probably the nature of her job - Tony is an all-day-every-day sort of person, so much so that her apartment is starting to collect dust from lack of use and she probably shouldn’t think about it too much, but she does. And it _ does _ worry her. This - _ this _ \- isn’t a normal boss-employee relationship. She sits at his kitchen table and steals food off his plate and borrows his clothes sometimes when she doesn’t have anything clean to wear. She has a bedroom here. They go out to lunch three or four times a week. She spends weeks stressing about what to get him for Christmas or his birthday. She worries herself sick every time he goes to clubs or comes home late or doesn’t sleep or doesn’t eat or seems upset about something she’s unable to fix. She does all these things and a hundred more and the scariest part of it all is the fact that the idea of her life _ without _any of those things makes her feel hollow and sick. Tony and all his antics and ridiculousness has become so ingrained into the fabric of her life that she thinks losing him would probably do just as much damage as having her lungs ripped out of her body. 

And that scares her. 

So she just sighs a little before allowing a smile to creep back onto her face. “No. You’re fine.”

He stares at her for a second longer, gaze sharp and scrutinizing and apologetic before turning back to his dinner, stabbing experimentally at a piece of beef, and she turns back to her - his - paperwork, frowning over some wordy legal clause that sort of goes over her head. 

And it’s somewhere in between the silence and the sound of chewing and paper rustling and the tirade about stocks and Denny’s restaurants Tony launches into ten minutes later that Pepper can’t help but give her full attention to that she realizes she might be in love with him. 

And that scares her. More than she can comprehend. More than anything else in the world. 

—

“I’m dying. God, I’m actually going to die. I haven’t even updated my will and it’s a Tuesday and I’m going to die.”

He is not dying. He has a head cold and a fever, according to a combination of her and Jarvis’s assessments. Potentially the flu, but likely not, considering he’s well enough to complain every four and a half seconds. 

She rolls her eyes and fights back a smile. In her hands are decongestant spray, several packs of tissues, and a tub of soup. 

“You’re not dying,” she informs him, all business-like, setting the soup down. “Also, it’s a Saturday.”

“Saturday!” Tony moans, pressing his face into his hands. He looks a little pale, and his nose and eyes are rimmed red, but other than that he looks fine. “I’m dying on a Saturday. What the fuck. I should be getting laid right now.”

Pepper allows herself the eye roll and takes the offended huff Tony shoots her way in her stride. 

“This is not funny,” he says seriously, pulling the blankets up to his chin and glaring at her. “This is -” He breaks off to cough, wincing. “- very not funny.”

“Very,” she deadpans, crossing his bedroom to lower the blinds a little.

“You’re going to regret having been so mean to me when I die,” he informs her languidly, massaging his chest. “You will be very heartbroken.”

She arches an eyebrow at him. “Is that so?”

“You will. You will cry a lot. If you don’t I will be very offended.”

“You’ll be dead,” she reminds him, smiling, and he looks distraught all over again.

“Stop making a mockery of my situation, woman,” he says into his hands. “This is horrible. You should feel horrible for me.”

“My soul bleeds in sympathy,” she says dryly. “Do you need anything else?”

He coughs again. Now it’s Pepper who winces - that really doesn’t sound good - and makes a mental note to go out and get some cough suppressants as soon as possible. 

He frowns up at her, sniffing. “You - are you leaving?”

Pepper’s stomach flips over. “Do you want me to stay?”

Tony pauses, sighing as he stares her dead in the eyes. “Yeah.” 

“You’re sick.”

“You have an amazing immune system,” he points out, leaning against his headboard. “I have never seen you get sick before. I honestly think you might be a robot.”

“I do get sick,” she points out, crossing the room again and carefully settling herself down on the corner of his bed. “I’m just less dramatic about it.”

He frowns at that. “But you’re always - here. Like, always.”

”That’s true. You do make a point of blowing up my inbox when I’m running twenty minutes late; I think if I skipped a day you’d actually be rendered incoherent with panic.” 

He doesn’t laugh at the joke. Just frowns some more. “You work when you’re sick?”

“Most of the time, yes.”

He seems unusually upset by this. His eyebrows come together and tilt upwards, mouth quirking down at the corners. “You shouldn’t do that,” he says, almost gently. 

She tells herself it’s just the fever as she ducks her head. “It’s okay. Now, I’m going to run out and grab you some more medicine, then I’ll be right back, okay?”

His frown worsens. “Promise?”

Definitely the fever. 

But she still smiles, and the expression, as always, comes easier than she expects it. 

“Promise.”

—

To this day, she has never seen him cry. 

She asks about it once, and he changes the topic in a record amount of time. It becomes one of the things they can’t talk about - or rather one of the things they agree not to talk about. Like that night he punched a hole in the wall, or his father, or Pepper’s mother, or Pepper’s childhood, or his drinking. 

Sometimes Pepper wishes he would let her ask about them, if only because it must be such a lonely way to live, only ever sharing your secrets with yourself. 

She knows when he cries, he cries alone, and that makes her very sad. Sometimes she wishes she could be there to help, to shoulder whatever burden he was dealing with, to comfort him, whatever. Sometimes she doesn’t, though, because she knows she wouldn’t really know what to do if she was.

—

“You should call me Tony more.”

They’re in the car on the way back from a press conference. Tony and somehow taken seven pens home with him and is now trying to hook them together into a giant circle. There’s a smudge of ink on his chin, and his hair is sticking up at the back. He’s grinning ear to ear. 

Pepper would never admit it, but there isn’t a lot she wouldn’t do to secure that expression on his face for a long time - forever, maybe. There’s something about it that makes the jumbled up, mismatched pieces of the universe around her settle into order. There’s something about it that just makes her feel - happy. His happiness is contagious. It always has been.

She hums, casting a sidelong glance at him. At the front of the car, Happy is laying on the horn, muttering a stream of expletives under his breath. She ignores it. “Should I?” she asks instead, smiling a little.

His kees bump against hers as he shifts a little, pen-circle already deemed boring and discarded to the floor of the vehicle. “Yes,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I think you should.”

His knees stay pressed against hers. She wouldn’t move if someone was holding her at gunpoint and telling her to do so.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t like you calling me Mr. Stark all the time. It’s so -” He waves his hands around abstractly, looking for the words. _ “Stuffy.” _

“It’s your name.”

“True. I still think you should call me Tony, though. I mean, Rhodey calls me Tony -”

“Please do not tell me you’re about to start conflating me with Rhodey now. If you ask me to do shots off a stripper I might actually have to quit.”

“- because we’re friends. I don’t think he’s physically able to call me Mr. Stark. He must be allergic. Also -” He points a finger at her, grinning. “That was only one time, and she was very pretty. The bourbon was amazing, too. But, anyways. Point is -” More hand waving. “He calls me Tony because he’s my friend and I his. And I’d say _ we’re _ friends too, yeah? So - formalities _ can _ be disregarded at some point, I’d say.”

“You’re my boss,” she reminds him. Or herself. Probably herself.

He looks almost hurt. “Can’t I be both?”

_ No_, she thinks without prompting, _ because you are my boss and I need this job to live in LA because LA is expensive and I have no family to go back to if this all goes to shit and you are my _ boss _ and sometimes I forget that. And I can’t keep doing that. Also, losing this job would be the worst thing to happen to me, and I hate that, but it’s true.__ Also, I am in love with you. It’s horrible. _

But she doesn’t want to think that because he _ is _ her friend and she knows it and he knows it. Maybe calling him by anything but his first name is just a convoluted way for her to keep distance between them - more for herself than him, really. 

“You can,” she says aloud. _ You are. _

God, when did she turn into _ this? _

He blinks at her before breaking into a huge smile again and retrieving the pens from the floor. “Good,” he says, squinting at her through the circle they’ve made. “Good.”

—

The next December 16th, she shows up at the mansion without invitation. 

He’s in the living room, curled up on the couch with his back pressed up against the arm and his hands gripping the leather so hard she can see his fingertips going white. He looks like he’s trying to hold himself in place. His face is totally blank and he doesn’t so much as breathe in response to her entering the room and setting her bag down silently, but he does smile a little when she stops in front of him and nudges his legs with her knee. 

“Move,” she tells him, and he does, surrendering his grip on the couch. They’re sitting so close that their thighs are pressing together and Pepper has to angle her body awkwardly to keep their shoulders from bumping. 

“I’m sober,” he says flatly. Sometimes tells her that is not what he wants to be now. 

“That’s good,” she says. “I’m proud of you.”

And she means it. 

When he looks back at her, his eyes are filled with tears. They shine in the low light of the living room, wide and open and terrified, and, before she can stop herself, she’s pulling him into a hug. 

His face presses against her shoulder, eyes burning right into her collarbone, and she presses her cheek against the side of his head, letting one of her arms wrap around his shoulders and the other move up to grip the hair on the base of his knock. 

His body shakes minutely. He is totally silent as he cries, and Pepper's own throat feels like there’s a vice slowly wrapping around it, choking her out. All she wants is for him to be happy, and it makes her equal parts furious and defeated that the universe will not let this come to pass and she doesn’t know how to make it happen, either. He is the type of person who deserves to be happy for longer than a few hours, or a day. He deserves a lifetime of it, and all she wants to do it give it to him. 

“It’s okay,” she murmurs into the side of his head. His hair is soft and smells distinctly like oranges. “You’re okay.”

He shakes his head against her shoulder. The next breath he takes - she hadn’t even noticed he’d been holding it - is shuddery and raw. 

“You’re going to be okay,” she says, blinking furiously because this is Tony’s day and Tony’s moment and she will not encroach upon it with her own unpredictable emotions. So she just blinks some more and presses half her face into his hair. She sort of wants to stay like this until the sun explodes. “I got you. Everything’s going to be okay.”

—

They only kiss once. 

It’s the middle of the afternoon, a slow day at work, and Pepper is upstairs idly checking her email to kill time when Tony calls her down to the workshop. He drags her around by her arm, excitedly pointing to all the prototypes for new bots he has dotted around the lab. 

“Look, look,” he says, tugging her down so they’re both crouching on the floor and waving his free hand at the semi-assembled pile of wires and metal in front of them. “It doesn’t look like much now, I know, but _ trust me. _A few more days and I’ll have this bad boy up and running and say goodbye to ever having to do a goddamn thing around the house again.”

“What, is it going to transport takeout down here to you now?”

He rocks back in his heels, frowning. “Well, it’s save you the trip.”

She huffs, bumping his knee with her shoulder. “You’d miss me far too much if you replaced me with a robot.”

“True. I think your relentless nagging about my healthy eating keeps me young. Stop doing it and I might just turn into an eighty year old man and die.”

“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen to normal people.”

He gives her a smile that’s all warmth, and she feels it from her head to her toes. “Thank goodness I’m not like normal people, then.”

It’s such a stupidly _Tony_ thing to say and suddenly all Pepper can feel is his knee pressing against hers and his sharp exhale ruffling against her face and the heavy pounding echoing around her head. His eyes are glowing in the way that they do whenever he talks about his work and she realizes with a surge of happiness from head to toe that he is so proud of what he does down here.

She kisses him before she can think about what she’s doing. His free hand jumps up to curl at the join between her jaw and neck, thumb smoothing circles over her cheek, and his other hand - which was still holding onto her wrist - slips down to lock fingers with hers. 

It’s more intimate and soft than anything she could’ve imagined, and she pulls back before the pressure in her chest gets too much. Something inside her feels like it’s crumbling away, and she is so, so scared by it. 

They can’t do this. _ She _ can’t do this. 

“We can’t,” she says aloud and it’s a hopelessly short, bad explanation, but he’s always been good at understanding things like that. He does this time, too, because something sad and soft flits across his face. 

“Okay,” he says simply. 

He doesn’t drop his hand. Or let go of hers. 

“Tony,” she whispers. The pressure in her chest makes her feel like she’s about to explode and she wants to do that somewhere far away - upstairs in her office or bathroom or actual apartment; anywhere that isn’t close to him because this already isn’t fair and he doesn’t deserve this at all. 

“Okay,” he says again, and lets her go. 

—

When Tony’s Humvee gets blown to oblivion and he is captured, Pepper gives up all pretenses of professionalism and practically moves into his house. 

It’s an undeniably weird thing to do, but Pepper is so shot full of grief and drawn-out terror and exhaustion to care. Plus, if Rhodey - who is also practically living at the mansion now, too - notices anything odd about it, he keeps his head down and says nothing. 

She copes, in the barest sense of the word. She does the job she is supposed to do as well as she can do it, given the circumstances - the circumstances being the fact that Tony is gone and very likely dead and every time she thinks about that she stops being able to breathe - and no one asks any more of her. She does her job and kills her free time by wandering around the big, empty mansion, dragging her fingers across the walls and looking around every corner, as if Tony will be there, hidden among the potted plants and decorative art. 

Sometimes she cries. Most of the time she’s too tired to. Most of the time she’s too tired to do anything but walk around and stare at the ground and notice how the hardwood floors are the exact same shade of brown as his eyes and wonders if this is intentional or if it’s just one of those things she’s started to notice more and more. 

After that point, she usually starts crying. 

Pepper has, at this point, been working for Tony for a long period of time, and she knows a lot about him. She knows he refuses to drink any other type of coffee but black. She knows his favorite color - greyish-blue for interior design, dark red for clothing, pale pink for just the sake of colors. She knows he hates going out in public alone. She knows he wears sunglasses all the time because he wants to look at people without them really being able to see him. She knows his parents are dead. She knows he loved his mother very much - and still does. She knows he talks to the bots when he thinks no one is listening because he worries they get lonely. She knows the only galas he likes attending are charity ones, even if he rigorously pretends he hates all social events. She knows his favorite food - fried rice - and his favorite song - _ Walk All Over You _ by AC/DC - and his favorite time of day - dawn - and his favorite drink - cherry coke or scotch. She knows he uses humor as a defense mechanism and likes being told _ no _ because no one ever tells him it and he thinks its refreshing. She knows he feels bad about leaving all the people he sleeps with before the wake up, but not bad enough to stop. She knows he is scared of the dark. She knows he is scared of being alone, too, and even more scared of ending up like his father. She knows he is one of the smartest people in the world and still manages to have the social skills of a five year old, sometimes. 

Most importantly, maybe, she knows that he knows how to survive. How to take a situation at face value and deconstruct and rebuild it into something he can work with, no matter how awful the initial model may seem. He is an architect, an engineer, a mechanic. He understands how to fix things; he understands how to make things into the best version of themselves when he wants. She knows that he has survived everything life has thrown at him thus far and, as the rules of probability dictate, he will survive this, too. She knows he will come home, and she knows that things will be okay again.

Any other alternative is unlivable. 

—

**Author's Note:**

> this took me like 700 years to write idk why also i am such a sucker for pre im1 relationship timeline stuff like this GOD its just. *chefs kiss*
> 
> also thinking abt doing one of these for tony and rhodey during mit days. also tony and peter in the gap between hoco and iw. stay tuned.....
> 
> (title is from sweet disposition by the temper trap)


End file.
